


the holy dark was moving too

by OldEmeraldEye



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Muriel is not a good person, Muriel/Tara's mother, Tara and her mother are white witches, but even she has a line she refuses to cross, roaring rampage of revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 09:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19885081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldEmeraldEye/pseuds/OldEmeraldEye
Summary: There are witches who go softly, and then there are witches who ... don't. Muriel is one of the latter.





	the holy dark was moving too

The Grand White Witch, as grand as she is, is not the first white witch Muriel’s had dealings with over the years. Far from it, in fact. There are times a witch’s survival involved mutual cooperation regardless or perhaps dues to, lack of alignment. Plus, it is the nature of dark witches that they are predators ... and far from pack hunters besides. It is ... nice to not have that threat while conversing with a fellow practitioner.

She hears the death in the whisper of a spider dismantling her web, feels it in the last glimpse of moonlight escaping a cart-formed puddle. It’s enough for her to change direction. There are a few implements she wouldn’t necessarily mind inheriting from such a witch as Rhian of the Clay.

The local watering hole is choking with the news as she slips in at the eve of witching hour. The barmaid, eight months pregnant if she is a day, blank faced as she serves a passable stew, darts an eye around when Muriel, wearing her gentlest face, asks after her old friend, such a kind girl she was, whatever could’ve happened . . .?

The answers she finds are not kind.

Muriel descends upon the farmstead like a summer storm, sudden and fierce. Her rage is fiercer still – wolves in the sheep pen and madness among the swine, salt in the well and crops blackening beneath the earth until the fields become a blight on the land.  
She kills the man slowly, and the boy child whimpering at the fire behind him quick.

She is about to set the house aflame, a pyre to kill any last rodents that it may hold when a patch of hay piled by the open door of the barn rustles and becomes a child, hair tangled and clay beads bound round her arms.

It is not sentiment that guides her hand from the claw of its casting and down to bring the girl child to her feet, nor bloodlust unquenched.

But she has been given aid, and would have returned it in time, and debt is no small thing to cast aside without consequence.

The girl has her mother’s eyes, eyes that are dark as the marks on her skin, and Muriel can almost taste the magic that flows through her as she asks “Are you a demon too?”

It is something much darker than fury that guides Muriel’s actions next.

“No, I am no demon. I am a witch, and so are you.” The girl frowns, but nods her understanding of that which they share.

“Now close your eyes and I will take care of this.”

Fire kills witches, dark and light alike. Witchfire kills more than that, seeps into and taints the soil if left to burn long enough. It is not anything of the sort Rhian could work, but her daughter ... her daughter, Muriel will teach. No rabble of farm hands will be her end, nor mortal man jealous of power.

One might even call that love.


End file.
